Biography of Clouds tells the fictionalized biography of Maria do Céu Silveira Ferreira, from her birth in 1933 until the birth of her first daughter. She was born to a relatively poor family, a very young couple of farmers, in a remote island in the archipelago of the Azores in Portugal, isolated and facing another island close by, Corvo. Maria do Céu´s story brings to the fore the struggles of everyday life and the belief systems in the Azores in the first half of the Twentyeth century.

Maria do Céu and her sister, Avelina, were the first girls to leave the island to further their studies beyond fouth grade. She lived in three countries in different continents, became a respectable middle class teacher with her military husband, Dinis, and, mostly on her own, raised three daughters to be fiercely authonomous and financially independent of their husbands.

Since Maria do Céu did not leave personal letters or a diary, Avelina da Silveira, her daughter, relied on fotographs and stories she heard growing up, to bring to life the youthful biography of a flawed, extraodinary woman.